“I believe that digital advertising is just another tool in the general media world. The economic downturn and slashed budgets have increased the need to think out of the box. One the benefits of digital media is that you can measure analytics in real time.
I also believe that advertising will become more personalized as we delve into Social Media. But as the Internet world becomes saturated with constant messages, we will have to go back to the basics: Good creative!” – WST

Here’s one of the things we do at Forrester Research: we interview as many marketers as we can about their plans, identify trends and project future likely conditions, and then we put together some numbers to make a projection. If you’ve ever seen a Forrester projection, it comes from a process like this.

This means that inside every projection is an idea or ten about the future. Those ideas can be powerful, and they come from research with marketers and consumers.

In this recession, marketers have learned that interactive marketing is more effective, and advertising less effective, per dollar spent. While budgets for online have decreased, they decreased less than other budgets. Six out of ten marketers we surveyed agreed with the statement “we will increase budget for interactive by shifting money away from traditional marketing.” Only 7% said “we have no plans to increase our marketing budget.”

Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase. Read More.

For those with an understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and its importance, hereis a comprehensive explanation of a new “SEO” called search engine operators. These operators allow you to see specific details about your keywords and can help with researching new and more effective keywords. – WST

By: Ivan Strouchliak

In this article we’ll share with you a couple of cool hacks to use in search engine optimization called advanced search engine operators. To use this article you must already be aware of your core keywords (the main keywords for which you’re trying to rank). If you’re not sure which keywords you want to target, use the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker for some research.

Using Advanced Search Operators – Intitle, Inurl, Inanchor

First, go ahead and open Google.com or Yahoo.com in a new window. Just follow the steps in the article and you’ll learn some new, helpful tricks. Use both to compare their usefulness.

NOTE: Keep in mind that Google doesn’t share much data with SEOs, while Yahoo is more open. Google is well aware that mainly SEOs use the commands described below, so it limits results on purpose. Take this information with a grain of salt.

Intitle: Command

intitle:keyword

intitle:”keyword phrase”

With this command, you will only see search results with your keyword phrase in title. The title tag is a crucial SEO element, and all pages targeted to a particular key phrase have targeted keywords in the title tag. With this command you can estimate the approximate number of competitors fighting over a specific keyword. Search both Google and Yahoo to get an average number.

As an example, a regular Google search for mortgage broker gives 7,440,000 results. A search with intitle:”mortgage broker” gives 251,000 results, which is a better representation of your competitors.

Search in Yahoo with this command gives 1,250,000 results. Yahoo’s results tend to be three to five times bigger than Google’s.

For example, if you search with inurl:”mortgage broker” you’ll see 102,000 results for sites that have “mortgage broker” in their URL. Chances are, the sites on the first three pages are your competitors.

Yahoo shows 408,000 results.

Inanchor: Command

inanchor:keyword

inanchor:”keyword phrase”

inanchor:keyword1 inanchor:keyword2 inanchor:keyword3

With this command you can see websites that have a specific keyword in anchor text pointing to the domain. Usually this means that the site did link building with this keyword phrase. Google shows 7,020,000 results for inanchor:mortgage inanchor:broker, which is not likely to be a real number, while a search for “mortgage broker” gives 7,450,000 results. As mentioned above, Google distorts this data.

Yahoo is a little bit better when it comes to the inanchor command. Its index shows 118,000,000 for “mortgage broker” and 982,000 results for inanchor:mortgage inanchor:broker, which is a more accurate. You’ll notice that Google’s search count is a lot smaller than Yahoo’s, so don’t trust those numbers too much.

The inanchor command is very important, but unfortunately search engines don’t share this information with SEOs for obvious reasons. Linkscape and Majestic SEO keep their own indexes of the web and allow SEOs to see the anchor text of links. You need to pay for both, but it’s worth it.

Also, keep in mind that Google is now putting a lot of weight on domain trust, rather than anchor text. Anchor text is still an important factor, but domain trust is just as important.

Combining Intitle and Inanchor Commands

By combining two commands you can get results that list real SEO savvy competitors. When you use this command you will see results that have your keywords both in the page title and as anchor text for incoming links. . . Again, take the information with a grain of salt and use both Google and Yahoo. Let’s see the results.

The results of search engine marketing are extremely measurable. Unlike many other advertising mediums, you can evaluate the effectiveness of each part of your campaign. With Web analytics, you can measure key information including the source of your website visitors by keyword and search engine and whether they came from pay-per-click or natural s